If you own a business then you likely own a website, and that means you need to understand online marketing, but a lot of website owners out there aren't familiar with the steps you need to take in order to be successful online. Most people see it as too difficult to learn because it's technical and there's a lot of data, but those are just numbers, and you can teach yourself anything if you just try.

You can always hire a company to do your social media marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, branding, etc. but you're not really learning anything and that means you won't know what to do if the people you're paying to do a job simply stop. I get it, you may be busy and don't have time to do it on your own, but that's when you need to sit down and read for an hour on open forums or blogs and learn it little by little. You can implement strategies and methods in order to boost your rankings, bring in sales, brand your business, and pretty much anything else. Sure, you may take longer to learn everything, but I can honestly say I don't know anything and I'm still a specialist in this field, so what's your excuse for not teaching yourself online marketing?

People are too busy to learn new things
Like I mentioned above, people always say they're too busy to learn new things like online marketing, but that's the biggest excuse I've heard in this industry. How often have people come home to just sit on the couch and watch TV or go out to dinner with friends? I would say that they likely do this 3 or 4 times a week, and that's the time when you could be learning about online marketing, which will push your business and website even closer towards success.

People assume it's difficult to learn
One of the biggest misconceptions in the online marketing world is that it's difficult to learn, and it really isn't as long as you put in the time and effort to really learn it. If you treat this as a job, you will learn it, you just have to dedicate yourself to the learning process and you can't think of it like when you were in school. Even though online marketing revolves around your native language, math, and a lot of other things you've learned in school, it's nothing like that and you need to think a little different.

If you can see this as a thing you're learning, that no one around you is talking about, you can likely learn it quickly because you don't think the way that you were taught in school. This isn't a difficult thing to learn, it's difficult to rank for competitive niches in a short amount of time, but in the end, it's not actually difficult. People tie difficulty with time invested, but that's just because the vast majority of us are impatient and don't want to put a ton of time into something that might not show results. If you can get past that you'll be more willing to teach yourself online marketing

People try, then fail, and eventually give up on it
It is true that online marketing can be done wrong, then your website is essentially burned, and people will always give up at that point and move back on with their day job. If you can get past the point of failure, and treat it as a learning experience, you'll likely be one of the people who stick it out for a long time and has a few websites up and running that are making a decent income.

In the beginning, you should have a website or two running, ones you don't really care too much about, and test out all your newly learned skills and methods on them. You can't care too much about these websites because you're just learning and you're likely going to get them penalized, so see these beginner sites as test sites. After you're confident enough with your abilities, that is when you start a real website that you want to make money from, because you will know what to do and what not to do.

People need to be taught and can't usually learn on their own
So many of us have been in school since we were little kids, and were taught the majority of what we know today, and that means we were taught that we are only able to learn when someone else is giving us lessons.

What if I told you that you can actually teach yourself something and know more about it than if you were to take a class on it? The problem with schooling is you're lumped in a room with other people and the lessons are diluted to a point where everyone can learn at the same pace. If you were to take an online marketing course, you'd likely learn a lot of stuff, but at the end of the semester, you will know about 1/4 of what someone else does who were teaching themselves.

You don't need someone to teach you online marketing, it's not a scary journey where you need your hand held, just go learn it by browsing open forums and blogs to see what people are doing and testing. If you don't know something, just ask on those forums or blogs, and people will respond.

In conclusion
The more you put into it, the more rewards you will obtain, and the more successful you will become. Online marketing does take a bit of time to learn most of what is out there right now, but you don't need to be a specialist in everything to be rich, you just need to be good at one thing in one niche to bring in all the sales and cash in. You only need one or two good ideas to become rich, and a lot of online marketers are chasing that dream, and a lot of us have created full-time incomes that need to be nurtured a little bit each week to stay stable

Responses (12)

You just have to understand that some people are lazy and ignorant. I will attribute these two qualities as the major reasons why most people are still stuck in stone age when they are supposed to be fully exploiting all the benefits that comes from getting into internet marketing and boosting their business reach and expansion. Anyone who fails to recognize the business benefits that comes with moving into internet marketing will definitely be left miles aways from his or her competitors.

So true, and you can also think about how people are afraid of change. The saying "If it isn't broke, why fix it?" applies to a lot of older people and how they run their businesses. They don't want to change anything, because their systems are working right now, but they don't really understand the true potential their businesses have if they were to just bring them online. I actually helped a mom and pop shop get online with a small eCommerce website, and I told them everything they needed to know with no BS added in. The old man was a simple person, but wanted all his information straightforward and not too much jargon, so I talked to him like he was an old friend and would say stuff like "No, you don't need that crap, it's just going to slow your website down and that's going to lose you money" which he understood completely and said "Screw that BS!" and we moved on lol

After about a week I have everything set up for them and they were starting to write their own content. They were in a small niche, so I knew they would rank for long-tailed keywords simply by getting quality content on their sites and getting them indexed, and they did After I thought they could handle everything on their own, I left them to do whatever they wanted, and I focused on my own things. I do still get calls from the old man every once in a while asking what his password is, and I now know to save it in case he calls, so I'll give it to him and ask for updates about his business going online. Last month he generated an extra $5,000 online just from the website I helped him put up He's extremely grateful and sends anyone he knows to me for website set up and online help lol I do make some money off of these people, but I try to help them as much as possible because they're usually in the same situation as this guy was, they don't want to change their setup but they now know they can put a lot more money away by having a different revenue stream

Ignorance definitely plays into my story, but it's the type of ignorance that comes from fear, not the ignorance we all talk about where people are just dumb lol. Most of the time people don't want to learn, which makes them ignorant, and that's why they aren't learning internet marketing. If they have to learn something new, it's scary, and they just don't want to try it at all and potentially risk their websites.

Being lazy is natural for some people that it is a common attitude that we usually see in our home. I have 11 siblings and it is a mix of industrious and indolent siblings so perhaps you can understand what I mean to say. But there are some lazy people who can do the marketing by using their own means. I can say that being lazy makes one to think about inventing methods that would save him work.

In truth marketing online is a hard job, in the sense that it's time consuming and an owner of a business can't simply do the marketing all by himself. In my opinion, it's more logical and cost efficient to hire a person or several persons to do your online marketing, it's either that or waste all of your time doing it. I learned it from experience.

I learned it over time by building my own websites and destroying them in the rankings lol. I learned what NOT to do pretty quickly, but now I can basically get any website ranked.

A lot of small business owners can't afford legitimate SEO that costs $5,000+ a month, so they'll tend to outsource to people who are cheaper, but they don't really know what they're doing so the website gets hurt in the end.

Business owners tend to be more hands-on, but when it comes to learning SEO and Online Marketing they think a specialist is required, but that's not the case at all. They can start by doing all of their on-page optimizations, that's actually the easiest part of the entire process, and they could even see a spike in traffic a week after they're done and all of their pages have been re-indexed. Some people I talk to are amazed at how they just tweak their titles and descriptions then their traffic increases due to the search engines starting to rank them better for their desired keywords.

Little tweaks can bring in a steady stream of traffic, which means more sales. and I don't understand why business owners won't want to learn these little tricks on their own in order to boost revenue.

I am guilty on 2 counts – I always assume that it is difficult and perhaps it’s because I am always busy. To be fair to me, I have a daytime job during weekdays and my position in the bank is not an ordinary one because I am in the big league. You can imagine the stress that I get from work that’s why I really don’t have time anymore for learning the intricacies of complex things like online marketing. However, I am trying to learn little by little as long as there is extra time in my schedule.

From someone who is trying to do it, I can confirm that it is the hardest thing I have ever done. There is so much information out there. You don't know what to focus on, because everyone has a theory on how things must be done. It is also hard to keep focused and not to loose your motivation. I have made a few dollars, and the process is so slow I confess because of the information gap( what i know and what i need to know). I'm thinking of signing in to a class that is free but structured.

I believe that some other people don't have the time and passion to learn such thing. And we must also understand that some people may not have the enough resources or instruments to learn things online. It's up to a person whether he/she wants to learn things online. There are some who prefers to learn the traditional way as well by just reading and listening to someone's perfomance in actual. There are a lot of ways to earn money. And based on my experience, there are some things online that are easy to learn and there are others that I find complicated. All you need to have is motivation and the will to work hard.

You need to put time and energy when staring an online business. It will not bloom just a matter of days. You need to be patient and study everyday how to improve your online marketing. Age also matters. There are some that will think that they're too old to learn new things. Don't easily be discouraged if you fail or you are earning just a small amount of money. If you start from scratch, then there are a lot more things to do. Just be patient, eager to learn new things, accept mistakes. Don't easily give up.

That is very true, one should never give up on the habit of learning new things in life. if we stop the process of learning then eventually our life becomes stagnant and the things that were very easy in the past appear to look very difficult for us. if however, we try to learn new things and stay updated with every new thing that happens in the online world then we are able to take advantage of it to increase our success, people tend to just refuse to do new things and do give up very quickly if they are not able to comprehend it. if however one remains patient and persistent in his efforts noting is impossible in this world.